Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Shrom Shootball to Foftball

It's funny how your tongue trains to maneuver words. Observing TV's language (or pronunciation, to be specific) development over the past few months has been interesting and enlightening.

The usual first words - mama, dada, baba started coming out a little before her first birthday. She has been saying aai (mom, in my language) since she was 4 months. She'd often say 'aai ghe' or just 'aai' in her fourth/fifth month. But I don't dare to publicise that for the fear of being scoffed at.

Many new words started flying soon after - bag, bat, bird, ball. Some often shortened - bo (for ajoba /grandpa). I wonder why the words starting with 'b' are popular (or are they easy) amongst the tots.

TV herself became 'T' first, then 'Tish' and now she is 'Tisha'

Then as her vocab built up further and she became adventurous, she tried repeating many words often pronouncing differently. Like saying 't' instead on 'k' - 'tata for kaka' 'tawl for crawl'. Then there have been others like 'yon' for 'one', 'yatch' for 'watch', 'yall' for 'wall'. The most memorable (also that lasted long enough) has been pronouncing 'sh' for 'ph' or 'f'.

'My shone'
'Shootball'
'stamp your sheet':)
'yon, two, thee, shor, shy..'
'livt' (lift)
'gooshy' (that's goofy)

This possibly lasted a month. Then she could pronounce 'f' when it was in the end of the word or when I made her pronounce it stand alone as 'fa'. So gooshy became goofy (good for him). But her phone was still shone and foot ball was shoot ball.

It's only last week (about a 3 week further), that she can manage to pronounce f, regardless of it's position in the word.

But now she's saying 'foft' for 'soft'. Now is that her way to practice saying f or is she confused with s and f in the same word or is she just kidding? Well I shall figure that out soon. But for now, her rapidly building vocab and such 'goosh ups' in pronouncing are posing a big challenge for us to understand her words in her long sentences.

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